Background
I just get Apex 300 and B300K. I am looking to get a EV that supports V2L and try to figure out how to integrate Apex 300 with my V2L from EV and grid together.
Thoughts
I’ve noticed. that Apex 300 seems to have a unique design that is not found on other unit. It supports two AC inputs through P050A and regular AC120V input outlet. After reading Apex 300 manual together with Hub A1 manual, I found this part is not well explained how can the two input ports be used together (or mutually exclusive). If I have to take a guess this will be controlled by the firmware implementation and can be reprogrammed by Bluetti. Perhaps that is why they did not documented it since they havn’t figured out whether they want to allow these two ports work together.
So my idea is that if I connect P050A to the grid with a NEMA TT-30P to P050A cable as suggested in the Hub A1 manual:
I can have Apex 300 to function as a UPS for at least the critical part of my house. But if I want to use my EV. as the second AC input to the house, I would choose to connect the V2L adaptor to the 120V AC input on Apex 300. This is when things gets tricky. Neither manual nor Bluetti app give any hint how these two inputs would behave when both ports have AC power. I would guess right now they probably have no implementation. so it would be mutually exclusive and fault might even triggered when both ports are connected. But there shouldn’t be any reason that Apex 300 can’t act as some sort of automatic switch that user can specify priority between them.
Does anybody have any thought for this? I hope Bluetti will see this post and add this feature to Apex 300 at some point. But right at this moment I do not have too much hope that Apex 300 will allow V2L to be used together with it.
@Katia.Nova
Unfortunately, you can’t connect both AC input ports at the same time — doing so will cause the Apex 300 to report an error and stop charging. This comes directly from our R&D team.
The setup you’re describing involves two AC input sources, which isn’t supported by the Apex 300 (or most portable power stations), as AC power cannot be merged directly like that.
However, you can achieve this setup using the AT1 Smart Distribution Panel. As the name suggests, the AT1 is designed to safely distribute AC power from multiple sources, such as the grid, generator, solar inverter — and in your case, EV V2L AC output.
The AT1 should handle this scenario with no problem.
Let us know if you have more questions!
I feel you are making this unnecessarily complicated. There are several different way you can implement this, the easiest way is to create a SW automatic switch in your firmware. Basically when the firmware detects there are two concurrent AC input source and ready to throw the code, instead of giving error to the user, you disable one and allow another to power the system. You can even add that to the app setting to allow your customer to decide which port should take the priority. There is no need to “merge” two AC input. It would be basically the same as your AC/DC dual input support now. I will be surprised if you need any HW change at all to provide this implementation. Unless you tried to save the cost by sharing the power path between these two AC input completely that makes it impossible to split at all.
The second way to implement this is to provide coarse load balancing by route the power from one AC port to certain output port, and another AC input power different output port. Like the first one this will depends on how much cost down in did in your circuitry. But if you have a quality design this should also be easy since there is no “merge” of two AC port at all.
I do understand that in order to merge two AC energy source you will need expensive and heavy module like transformer or something of that sort. So I never expect a battery at this weight and size can offer that. But for the two use cases I mentioned above I would hope you’d consider that. Also I am attaching the block diagrams to show some simple concept of this use cases. There are also a lot of potential you can provide similar implementation to support many many other use cases.
This is to switch to the 120V regular AC input by firmware, without physically unplug the plug from the grid:
Hopefully this helps to portrait the use cases.
@Katia.Nova
For safety concerns, merging 2 AC load (P050A and 15A AC port), it is not allowed, so the software engineers’ solution is to ban it completely. Also, during the development of Apex 300, we have not thought of such use case (dual AC input with Apex 300 only), and sort of throw all that into the AT1 smart distribution panel, thinking that will do the trick.
However, thank you for your feedback, and we will pass it over to the R&D team, then we will evaluate and make necessary software update.
Thank you for all the explanation. It was helpful.
So my understanding from what you were saying is that while it is possible to allow certain power distribution schemes on Apex300, like what I show in my block diagram, the Bluetti engineers has not really explored much of the possibility. But rather you put all the design effort for power distribution to your another accessory AT1?
By the way I did try to read at least part of AT1 user manual. It looks like from different use cases it supports, AT1 simply control these ATS and relays. It doesn’t seem to regulate the amount of power getting distributed to each port on it neither? I got confused between Apex 300 and its accessory AT1. You provide all the input and output ports on Apex 300, so why the users can’t simply use it to at least do very basic power distribution but rather have to pay for an even more expensive accessory to only do simple things like engage or disengage power relays? The product feature planning looked very weird to me. It is designed to work as UPS and backup power, but it can’t even toggle the relay on/off between two AC input ports or decide how much power I want to distribute to each AC/DC power port from battery and input AC/DC source? It’s simple PWM and you do have a proper ARM core as well as DSP to drive Apex 300. We are not really talking about “merging” here but just some very simply on/off switches and relays control here.
Anyway, I sincerely hope you can invest more engineering resource to update the firmware to make Apex more useful than it is now. Apex 300 is a very nice product and it would be a shame that you can’t control these nice HW to support customer use cases.
